The summer of 2020 has brought issues of equity and race to the forefront of society. How do we create tolerant and just climates at work? Changing the culture of an organization is challenging in the best of circumstances; today, it can seem impossible. Yet, it is more necessary and urgent than ever to address these issues thoughtfully and with effective practices that can produce real change. Six Darden professors have designed this teach-out to bring you the latest scholarship and best practices on diversity, equity and inclusion and organizational change. You'll learn how to identify and counteract inequity in organizations, how to build the business case for diversity and inclusion, and how managers can constructively address inequity. You'll also learn how to promote the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion at work, how to have difficult conversations, and how to manage and lead change.

The objectives of this MOOC are to enable you to learn from applying concepts, exercises and learning from the four other MOOCs in this specialization. Learners involved in our programs over the decades have repeatedly told us that going over the material several times helps them progressively delve into the meaning and application of the ideas and experiences. As a result, we have designed this capstone so that it would be the third iteration of working with the ideas and experiences about effective leadership and inspiring its development in others. The first iteration was during one of the other MOOCs in terms of the videos, readings, Forum chats and reflective exercises. The second iteration was doing one of the personal learning or action learning assignments in one of the MOOCs that involved talking to others and writing an essay about the experience. If you had not done the Action learning assignment, then one of the two projects for this MOOC would involve doing it. The third is reviewing and revising your analysis of the experience as the Capstone project to show evidence that you can Be a Leader and help another Develop as a Leader.

The third course in this Specialization introduces you to the factors that influence how effective boards of directors will be in carrying out their roles and responsibilities and hence the impact they have in shaping the success of the organization they govern. While this course has been developed with North American culture in mind, we do appreciate that, in other parts of the world, the nature of the factors that influence the effectiveness of nonprofit boards of directors may vary. Nevertheless,it is our hope that much of the course content will still be of value to those in other parts of the world. To learn more about this course, please watch the overview video by copying and pasting the following link into your web browser: https://goo.gl/aAMIfl. Keywords: Nonprofit; Nonprofit Sector; Voluntary Sector; Nonprofit Organizations, Non-Governmental Organizations, Volunteer Organizations, Leadership, Management, Governance, Board, Board of Directors, Performance, Effectiveness Course 3 Overview: Week 1: This week's questions: What factors influence the effectiveness of board meetings? What are the formal procedures and structures within the board that impact its performance? What can a board do to intentionally improve the way it structures itself and runs its decision making meetings? Week 2: This week's questions: What do we mean by board composition and development and why is it important? Why is it difficult to change the composition of the board? How do you design the ideal mix of board members? How do you locate, recruit and develop board members? Week 3: This week's questions: What do we mean by the "culture" of the board and why is it important? How do boards develop and pass along culture? Can board cultures be intentionally changed? What is the role of leadership in shaping board culture? What do effective nonprofit leaders involved in governance do? How can leadership be managed for higher performance? Week 4: At this stage, you are asked to review the course content, submit a written assignment (known lightheartedly as a BEAR (Board Effectiveness Readiness Assessment), and take two multiple choice Readiness Assurance Tests (known similarly as RATs). One RAT will assess knowledge and reading comprehension and the other will test application of knowledge within a practical case. Week 5: We will encourage you to discuss the RATs in the discussion forums and take them again should you wish to change any of your answers based on the information exchanged.

This course covers communication skills that engineering leaders use every day to motivate, inspire, and support the people in their organizations. Speaking and writing are basic leadership communication skills. (We covered these topics in the Specialization course 1 and 3.) However, leaders also need to be skillful interpersonal communicators. Modern business requires communication skills that are effective across cultures, generations, and genders. Communication is also a key skill in building your personal brand. Leaders need to look, act, and speak like leaders. Another important leadership skill is the ability to handle difficult, emotional communications with employees, supervisors, and colleagues. Finally, engineers are often at the center of crisis communication. In this course, you will learn 1. How to communicate in a global environment, 2. How to communicate across cultures, generations, and genders 3. How to use communication to build your personal brand, communicate your values, and your leadership promise 4. How to handle high-stakes, emotionally charged, difficult conversations with employees, supervisors and your colleagues 5. How to handle crisis communication Required Material Disclaimer- The purchase of a case study is necessary to complete this course, as it is tied to an assessment. This case is an excellent illustration of the typical business situations requiring skillful handling of difficult conversations. Currently, the cost associated with this case study is $8.95 USD and is subject to change. Selected materials courtesy of Communiation Faculty at Rice University - all rights reserved.

People are the most valuable asset of any business, but they are also the most unpredictable, and the most difficult asset to manage. And although managing people well is critical to the health of any organization, most managers don't get the training they need to make good management decisions. Now, award-winning authors and renowned management Professors Mike Useem and Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School have designed this course to introduce you to the key elements of managing people. Based on their popular course at Wharton, this course will teach you how to motivate individual performance and design reward systems, how to design jobs and organize work for high performance, how to make good and timely management decisions, and how to design and change your organization’s architecture. By the end of this course, you'll have developed the skills you need to start motivating, organizing, and rewarding people in your organization so that you can thrive as a business and as a social organization.

The capstone project consists of a case study that must be addressed to complete the specialization. In the case study, you will be asked to assume the role of the incoming chief executive officer of a fictitious privately held medical device company. From the company’s standpoint, its customers are the clinics that use and dispense its products, rather than the end-users of the company’s products. The company is currently facing a range of challenges, including obstacles to access for world-wide users of the company’s product, as well as internal conflict about the company’s priorities and a new disruptive technology. You will be asked to help the board address key changes in the industry, by developing a strategy to meet these challenges. Specifically, you will submit artifacts responding to a series of challenges related to the case. The artifacts will be peer-assessed on how effectively you applied concepts and skills explored throughout the specialization, assessed your own skills as a leader, evaluated the data to help you make an informed decision, developed a customer-facing design process, and communicated your strategy to relevant stakeholders.

Businesses run on data, and data offers little value without analytics. The ability to process data to make predictions about the behavior of individuals or markets, to diagnose systems or situations, or to prescribe actions for people or processes drives business today. Increasingly many businesses are striving to become “data-driven”, proactively relying more on cold hard information and sophisticated algorithms than upon the gut instinct or slow reactions of humans. This course will focus on understanding key analytics concepts and the breadth of analytic possibilities. Together, the class will explore dozens of real-world analytics problems and solutions across most major industries and business functions. The course will also touch on analytic technologies, architectures, and roles from business intelligence to data science, and from data warehouses to data lakes. And the course will wrap up with a discussion of analytics trends and futures.

This course will help you to navigate ambiguity in definitions of "Smart City". You can review successful cases and practices of different approaches to transformation management, determine the potential of your city in the digital transformation, as well as find useful practical advices on search for funding of various digital projects in your city. In addition, lecturers introduce you with formation of Smart City structure and infrastructure from the officials’ point of view. If you are already an expert in the field of Smart Cities, the course will give you the opportunity to assess your strengths and to improve knowledge in this field. You will gain additional skills in managing digital transformation programs with real examples, as well as you will be acquainted with communication methods and marketing of government projects.

We will analyze the pros and cons of creating a single or multiple Esport organization and recommend an effective branding strategy for a hypothetical Esport organization based on current Esport branding considerations. You will develop a plan for recruiting funding resources for a hypothetical Esports organization and choose an Esport organization role of interest, other than Owner, and describe your reasoning.

This course focuses on understanding subsistence marketplaces and designing business solutions for the billions of people living in poverty in the global marketplace. To develop understanding of subsistence marketplaces, we use exercises to enable participants to view the world from the eyes of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, facilitate bottom‐up understanding generated by participants, and provide insights from extensive research. More broadly, the course uses the context of extreme resource constrained contexts to learn about the bottom-up approach pioneered through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative, and apply it in any context. The course will involve virtual immersion in subsistence contexts, emersion of unique insights, bottom-up design, innovation and enterprise. A parallel project will focus on understanding a specific need in a subsistence marketplace, and designing a solution and an enterprise plan. Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to: • Develop an understanding of subsistence marketplaces • Design solutions for subsistence marketplaces • Develop enterprise plans to implement solutions for subsistence marketplaces • Apply the bottom-up approach for subsistence marketplaces as well as other contexts This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.